By that he means he seems to be channeling political columnist George F. Will, whose recent op-ed "The Limits Of Sunniness" in The Washington Post he finds right on point.
Will's topic is sunniness, a defining characteristic of the late conservative president Ronald Reagan. Reagan, writes Will, is psychoanalyzed in John Patrick Diggins's new book, "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History." Diggins suggests Reagan
... imbibed his mother's form of Christianity, a strand of 19th-century Unitarianism from which Reagan took a foundational belief that he expressed in a 1951 letter: "God couldn't create evil so the desires he planted in us are good."
Will expands this notion by likening the Reagan outlook to that of the 19th-century American essayist and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson:
This logic — God is good, therefore so are God-given desires — leads to the Emersonian faith that we please God by pleasing ourselves. Therefore there is no need for the people to discipline their desires. So, no leader needs to suggest that the public has shortcomings and should engage in critical self-examination.
James Madison, our fourth president and father of the U.S. Constitution, knew different, holding that "government's principal function is to resist, modulate and even frustrate the public's unruly passions, which arise from desires." Madison did not mistakenly equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of sunniness.
Wherein lies the difference? A clue comes from Michael Shermer's "Skeptic" column, "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction," in the March 2007 issue of Scientific American (not yet online at the time of this writing).
Shermer looks at several recent books on the topic of "why happiness can be so elusive in today's world." One of them is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, by Gregory Berns. Berns, an Emory University psychiatrist, has it that (in Shermer's words):
... the pursuit of pleasure lands us on a never-ending hedonic treadmill that paradoxically leads to misery. "Satisfaction [on the other hand] is an emotion that captures the uniquely human need to impart meaning to one's activities," Berns concludes. "While you might find pleasure by happenstance — winning the lottery, possessing the genes for a sunny temperament, or having the luck not to live in poverty — satisfaction can arise only by the conscious decision to do something. And this makes all the difference in the world, because it is only your own actions for which you may take responsibility and credit."
There is a link between George Will's vaunted Madisonianism and the pursuit of satisfaction rather than sunniness. The liberal agenda today has degenerated into merely pandering to people in their insistence that, if they are not "happy" — if their mood is not "sunny" — it is up to the government to fix things.
The guiding liberal assumption is that there is (to borrow Shermer's phrase) a "multiplicity of wonderfulness" to be enjoyed by one and all, if only the government would unlock the treasure chest. Logic would seem to dictate that a good way to unlock it would be to equalize our income levels. Hence, progressive taxation, which robs the rich to fatten the poor.
But, Shermer notes, studies show that people consistently favor a choice such as earning $50,000 a year, when others make $25,000, to earning $100,000 a year when others receive $250,000. Paradoxically, what people think would make them happy is to have more than others have — even if the absolute amount is less!
Meanwhile, the truth is that increasing yearly income above $20,000 per person doesn't make people any happier in the long term. Sure, an income boost makes us all temporarily giddy. Yet it wears off quickly. Soon we desire another happiness hit.
It's the same with sex, says Shermer:
Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht emphasized this point in The Happiness Myth ... . her deep and thoughtful historical perspective demonstrates just how time- and culture-dependent is all this happiness research. As she writes, "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." Take sex. "A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence."
Today we fool ourselves into believing "an array of sex partners adds to the spice of life." Today we have a government which in the name of a "right to privacy" won't deny a woman a legal surgical procedure to end her unwanted pregnancy. The government's "principal function ... to resist, modulate and even frustrate the public's unruly passions, which arise from desires" is lost in history.
oldstyleliberal, an heir to Emersonian thought, used to support legalized abortion. More and more he regrets that. He finds he has become more of a Madisonian.
That makes him a conservative à la George Will. Too bad that today's conservatism has identified itself with Ronald Reagan, and more recently with George W. Bush, who embodies that oxymoron, the "big-government conservative." According to author Diggins, per Will:
... big-government conservatism is an inevitable result of Reaganism. "Under Reagan, Americans could live off government and hate it at the same time. Americans blamed government for their dependence upon it." Unless people have a bad conscience about demanding big government -- a dispenser of unending entitlements -- they will get ever larger government.
The difference between big-government conservatives and big-government liberals? The former won't raise your taxes to motor the hedonic treadmill of government entitlements, and the latter will.
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